Challenges

New Amsterdam citizens – closed

City of Amsterdam

 

Background

In recent years, Amsterdam has welcomed thousands of status holders (refugees granted a residence permit). The City offers them support in finding work or starting an education programme, in combination with a compulsory civic integration programme. There are numerous programmes on offer, both within and outside the municipality, helping these new Amsterdam citizens with apprenticeships, internships, training courses and/or employment.

 It is virtually impossible for the status holders, their counsellors and other professionals to have an overview of all available programmes, making the ideal match with a job more difficult than it needs to be. There is too little overview and insight, and there is an overlap between similar initiatives that makes them hard to tell apart, or for which the criteria are formulated unclearly or too subjectively. Employers wishing to see how they can support status holders seeking permanent employment are also hampered by this lack of overview.

The City therefore wishes to develop a tool that offers status holders, programme providers and other professionals an overview of the available work and activation programmes.

The challenge

Develop a solution that offers everyone (status holders as well as professionals) an easy and accessible overview of the available programmes in terms of work/education and activation programmes.

 

Criteria

  • The solution should motivate status holders to participate in these programmes;
  • The solution must be accessible to (new) Amsterdam citizens of all levels, also those with a minimum level of knowledge/language/cognitive ability (i.e. it must include low literacy and illiterate individuals);
  • It must be possible to scale the product up or down, and it should be suitable for use for similar challenges encountered by other cities as well as by the City of Amsterdam;
  • The solution must be easy to update/maintain, for all parties involved;
  • The startup must speak and read Dutch at the tertiary level (since the startup will receive a large amount of information about numerous programmes and their criteria in the first instance, they must be able to understand this information);
  • The startup should have some background knowledge of, and affinity with, civic integration and refugee policy;
  • The target group – consisting mainly of status holders, professionals and other civic integration parties – must be involved in developing the product in some way;
  • The startup must be familiar with the City’s corporate communication style (www.amsterdam.nl/stijlweb).

 

Issued by: RVE Werk, Participatie en Inkomen

For further information: https://www.amsterdam.nl/immigratie/vluchtelingen/amsterdamse-aanpak/